


the Happy Ending

by local_doom_void



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, But it does serve the plot, Crying, Don't copy to another site, Dramatic Irony, Everyone's crying including the author, Family Feels, Gen, Hedwig deserved better, Hedwig's back bitches, Merope is unaware that her son is Voldemort, Merope tries to be a good person, Mom Merope Gaunt, Mostly for fleshing out Merope, Original Character(s), Reunions, This afterlife is not supposed to be any particular religion, You'll see how, so much dramatic irony
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2020-01-05 01:21:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18355691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/local_doom_void/pseuds/local_doom_void
Summary: Absence made the heart grow fonder, allegedly - but could it grow fonder when absence was all that there had ever been? Merope, at least, found that she could love in the utter absence that was dying moments after your son was born.(or)Merope wants nothing more than to meet her son, about whom she knows almost nothing. Harry Potter may be able to help her - if she still wants to go through with it once he's finished telling her about him.(alternatively titled: Have you seen this Dark Lord?)





	1. a Squib's history of magical Britain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear everyone who cried when they first read the Battle of Hogwarts sequence in DH, or who continues to cry when they re-read it:
> 
> I'm sorry, but I might make you cry again. Part of this chapter includes my own long-overdue catharsis for that sequence. I swear it's relevant for setting the scene of our fiction. Don't talk to me. *sob*

To be Merope Gaunt Riddle was to live a long exercise in patience.

Then again, she thought as she awoke to a gently pulsing light seeping in past her bedroom curtains, perhaps ‘live’ wasn’t exactly the correct word, in the afterlife.

She sat up, feeling rather weary despite it being morning, and then saw that the crsip green letters of her bedside clock only read 3:43. But there was the light - quite bright, lighting up the room as if dawn were creeping across the horizon. She watched her gauzy curtains flutter for a moment, and then slipped her feet carefully off the bed and padded across the carpet to the window. The clouds in the sky were glowing brightly, their light a pale silver.

Oh dear, she thought.

Somewhere back on the living Earth, a lot of people had just died.

But Merope had been dead for a long while, so she knew there wasn’t really anything she could do about that. She felt badly, of course. Those people were probably scared, and maybe tomorrow she would go to the Gardens and see if she could help with their adjustment to the dying world. For now, she simply slid down her blackout curtains, plunging the bedroom into darkness but for the eerie green glow of the alarm clock.

She padded back to her bed and slipped under the warm duvet, turning over so she faced away from the clock.

  


In the morning - the real morning - the clouds were still glowing, but the bright light of the sun was augmenting them as well. Merope bathed and carefully washed and combed her long, dark hair, before dressing in a simple black and maroon dress. Downstairs she prepared herself a breakfast of oatmeal and fruit, with a little bit of sugar on top. She didn’t much like sweet things, because she’d never had them as a child, and had never developed the appetite, but a small dusting lightened the flavors of the fruit very well.

She took her sunglasses before she left, slipping them on to help cut the light outside. Five paths led away from her doorstep, stretching in all directions - she took the centermost, one made of dark, shiny obsidian gravel ground so smoothly that it seemed almost like sand. The grains stuck to one another as she strode through it, pressing up around the edges of her shoes. Soon the landscape around her warped and bled, but only for a second. Then it settled again, into a new look entirely from the gentle flower-bushes that surrounded her little cottage. Now there were tall trees with silvered-white bark and brilliant green leaves tinged by red tips, pale pink and gray brush and ferns curling up from their roots.

Merope kept walking down the path, and soon came upon a little encampment of tents and outdoor shops. She smiled a little, the expression crooked on her face, and combed her fingers through her hair to resolve any untoward knots that had formed during her travel. One of the stall attendants waved to her, and she recognized a fellow squib, dead in the 1700s, who she herself had met when she had been only recently late.

“Merope!” Amarantha called, coming out from behind her stall. “You’ll never guess what’s happened!”

“Oh?” Merope said, blinking behind her sunglasses. Her hopes tried to rise at Amarantha’s excited tone, but she forced herself to remain outwardly calm. It was so unlikely, after all, that... “Here, or there?”

“Away there,” Amarantha said. She gestured vaguely up at the still-glowing clouds in the air. “You remember that Dark Lord in Britain, right?”

“Voldemort? The French one?”

“Apparently he’s dead!”

“Oh!” Merope exclaimed. That was news - maybe even good news. “Do we know how? Some sort of a battle, I guess…” She looked up at the sky again.

“Aye, we’ve had a few through,” Amarantha said solemnly. “They’re fighting at Hogwarts - would you believe it? All that history that’s probably being destroyed for them… bloody Dark Lords.”

“I hope the students there are alright,” Merope said softly, pressing her hands together. She knew even as she said it that not all of the students would be alright. There would be some dead. She didn’t allow herself to hope that none of the dead were children, because she knew she would be disappointed, but she did allow herself to hope that only very few of the dead were children. That might still be possible, if the adult teachers up away had any sense.

If the disaster of deaths had been mostly muggle, Merope might simply have stayed at the greeting plaza to the Gardens and kept Amarantha company. But she knew there would be mostly - even perhaps all - magical deaths this time around, and she also knew she couldn’t sit and do nothing.

“Do you have any blankets I could bring?” Merope asked.

“Going in?” The question was only a politeness, as Amarantha moved away to the stall immediately. Merope followed her, nodding, and stepped into the tent proper. It was expandable inside, the majority of the floor covered in soft blankets and pillows. There were three other people in the tent - a shabby-looking man and a woman with very pierced ears sitting in the center, facing one another, their foreheads nearly touching as they held hands tightly and conversed in low, anguished voices. In the corner, a young mousey-haired boy wearing a dust-smeared robe sat with his knees drawn up, clutching an ancient-looking camera in one hand, a blanket around his shoulders in the other.

Merope felt her eyes begin to burn, and dabbed at them quickly with the hem of her sleeve. The man and the woman seemed to be occupied with each other, but the boy was alone, so she carefully picked her way over and knelt down next to him. He blinked up at her, eyes red, but said nothing.

“Hello,” Merope said softly, willing herself to smile again. Her smiles were always a little crooked, just because of the way her jaw was put together with her skull, but she had found that children especially found it more endearing than not - or at least, they seemed to.

Still the boy said nothing, so she continued. “My name is Merope,” she said. “Is it alright if I ask yours?”

Slowly, the boy nodded his head, a jerky little motion. “C - Colin,” he said dully. “Creevey.”

“Hello, Colin,” she said softly. “I’m about to go look for more people in the Garden, so I’m afraid I can’t stay long, but would you like a hug before I go?”

Colin’s lips wobbled, and then the blankness shattered just enough for her to see his eyes fill with tears. “Y - yeah?”

She wrapped her arms around him, mindful of his camera, and patted his shoulder gently. The boy squeezed her back, almost enough to knock the air from her lungs, but he did let go when she moved back to sit on her heels again.

“Th-thanks,” Colin wibbled, wiping at his eyes. Merope smiled at him again, and stood, brushing the dust from her knees.

“I’ll be back later, and I’ll try to find you again, if you like?” she offered.

“I - would like that,” Colin said thickly.

“Okay,” Merope said. “It’s okay, Colin. It gets better from here, I promise.”

“Y-yeah,” Colin mumbled. Merope didn’t know if he believed her or not, but she couldn’t control that. Instead, she turned around and made her way to where Amarantha stood with a small packet of blankets.

“Little Colin’s a muggleborn,” Amarantha murmured to Merope as she took the blankets. “He told me that only the students who were of age were allowed to stay and fight, if they wanted to. Everyone else was told to leave - he snuck back in, and…” She trailed off.

Merope’s throat closed for a moment, and she let herself find her voice before she spoke again. “Well,” she said. “At least the teachers away there are sensible.”

“Aye.” Amarantha looked at her curiously. “You still get so upset, Mer.”

“They’re just children,” Merope wibbled. “And I always think - ” She stopped herself.

“Yeah,” was all her friend said to that. “Don’t you go bringing me any Death Eaters, right? Or Merlin forbid, the one and only Dark Frenchie himself.”

“Ugh.” Merope shuddered at the thought. “I would never.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Amarantha laughed. The clear sound made everything just a bit more bearable, for the moment. “Go on, then. I’ll see you later.”

Merope waved goodbye, and walked calmly into the Garden with her blankets.

  


Some called it the Grave Garden, but Merope had always thought that the moniker was too morbid. There were no real graves in the Garden, after all - and it wasn’t as though the dead were putting themselves to some sort of eternal sleep here, in a retirement even from the afterlife. No, Merope thought, there was no reason but unnecessary melodrama to call it with the word ‘grave’.

She would admit to calling it a Garden, because it was a garden. The garden was vast and deep, rolling mulch and flagstone paths set amongst wild, overgrown flowerbeds, patches of bamboo and orchid-laden vines, and even wild evergreen hedges or small but dense and dark groves of white birch trees, or of pine, willow, holly, yew. The ground rolled in knolls and low hills, occasionally dipping down into a gray silted ditch where a clear brook flowed between the plants or the paths. Merope had been to the Garden many times, and it had never looked the same - just as the paths had never been the same. It was like that for everyone, of course - they’d even done studies on it, and making maps? Impossible.

It was interesting to Merope, too, how easily everybody had took that when the study had first been done. Of course they said that the paths changed every time, but the researchers had actually tried to use surveyer’s equipment. They had gotten readings, but different every time, with no pattern to it regardless of the number of following expeditions. Merope knew that if that had happened to a garden on Earth, hysteria would have followed. Here, everyone merely nodded, and accepted it, and moved on. That was one of the things she enjoyed most about being dead.

She had been walking for some time when she found her first dead - a young wizard in brown robes, with a face full of freckles and short, fiery red hair. He was lying in a flowerbed of foxgloves and irises, the stems growing around his limbs and chest as if trying to bind him to the ground. Again, Merope was reminded of her occasional thought that the dead were pushed up through the ground, from some unknown place below.

The wizard’s eyes were closed, but he breathed steadily, without labor. Merope knew he would not wake without his own consent, so she found a nearby tree to lean against and wait.

She was prepared to wait for hours, but fortunately it took only a few moments for the wizard’s eyes to roll open. For a long moment he stared at the bright sky, his eyebrows furrowing as if confused.

“George?” he said slowly. “Perce?”

Merope let her blankets down by the tree and slowly picked her way a bit closer to him. “Hello?” she called. The wizard started at the sound of her voice, and began to sit up. This led him to notice all the plants on him - with some astonishment he pulled at them, ripping stems and scattering petals to the ground. Merope watched, willing herself to stand by until he seemed less bewildered.

“Hello?” the young man said, staring around. His eyes landed quickly on Merope, who hastily tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “Ah - ‘Ello, miss,” he said, slipping into a wavery but attempting-confidence tone, a crooked smile slipping across his face. “What’s a nice lady like you doing in - er - ” Another look around. “ - in a weird… meadow… like this?”

He looked around again, then back to her. “Where’s Hogwarts?” he asked.

Merope stepped closer still, until she could kneel down in the flowers at a respectful distance. “I don’t really know, to be honest,” she said in reply. “I’m Merope. Can I ask your name?”

“Eh - Fred,” the young man said. “Fred Weasley.”

“Hello,” Merope said, smiling her crooked smile at him. With one of her hands she gave a small wave. “Is it alright if I call you Fred?”

“Please do,” Fred said. “Listen - Merope, you said? You seem really nice, but I have to find my family - there’s this - well, actually - ” He paused, squinting carefully at her outfit again. “Just - there’s this massive, bad situation, and I need to go find - ”

He began to get to his feet. Merope stood with him, offering him her arm. He took it after it became apparent that his legs were a bit wobbly, and she decided she wanted to offer him a bit of clarity. “Fred?” she said.

“Hm?”

“You can talk about Hogwarts, it’s fine. I know all about it and magic - I’m a squib, technically, but I do know.”

“Oh,” Fred breathed. “Well - alright, see, there’s this massive fight against Moldyshorts going on, and I can’t see any of Hogwarts or Hogsmeade or my family, and I have to go. You know?”

Merope kept a hold on his arm, just in case he tried to bolt - not that it would do much good, she knew. But he felt the tightening of her grip and looked at her questioningly.

“Fred,” she began. “I need you not to go haring off, please? I’m afraid I don’t know what’s happening with your family, but - ” She swallowed. “You can’t really help them right now. You’re dead.”

Fred Weasley stared at her.

“... You missed your punchline,” he finally croaked, a slightly hysterical smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “S’not a proper joke. See, I know jokes, miss Merope, I run a joke shop, me and Georgie do - oh, sorry, George is my brother,” he babbled, “my twin. You know we even - we might be winning, you know? Harry’s got this plan, you know, to off old Moldyshorts, and - ”

“Fred,” Merope interrupted him, tugging on his robe sleeve. “Fred. It’s okay.” She remembered what Amarantha had told her. “I’ve heard from a source I trust, though I don’t know where she heard it from, that Voldemort - ” Fred flinched, but she kept her grip and continued - “that Voldemort is dead. So, the plan worked, whatever it was.”

She tried to smile at him. Fred was staring dazedly into space, one hand patting vaguely at his torso. 

“... This is…” he mumbled. “I had a big cut here.”

“All your wounds get healed by the Garden before it spits you up out here,” Merope told him. “Would you like a blanket? I’m told it helps.”

A wretched expression crossed Fred’s face. “You said he’s dead,” he said. “Mold - Voldemort.” The name was spat defiantly, and he waited for a few moments, before looking around in awe and continuing. “You said he’s dead.”

Merope nodded.

A vindictive snarl of triumph twisted across Fred’s face, and was gone. “Good,” he said viciously. “Now we can - we’ll have to deal with him here - is there some way - ”

Merope shook her head. “He’s already taken care of, really,” she told Fred. “You can’t hurt anyone here unless they allow you to do it, and people can’t be killed again, of course. If he tries, the killing curse will just do nothing, and any torture curses just won’t work. You can’t grab people who don’t want to be grabbed, either.”

Fred stared down at her in awe, a glimmer of joy sparking in his eyes. “Really?” he breathed.

“Really,” Merope nodded, trying to smile reassuringly. “I promise. I’ve seen the no-killing law at work myself. It really works. He’ll be able to do nothing but yell at people - and even then,” she continued, “you can decide if you don’t want a specific person to be able to have anything to do with you. So you could decide you never even want to see him, much less hear him, and he’ll never encounter you or you him.”

“That’s brilliant,” Fred said breathlessly. His eyes were glimmering even more now, watering. He scrubbed at them with his free hand. “Oh Merlin, we did it. We did it.” He let out a shaky laugh, half of it more sob than laugh.

“Blanket?” Merope asked again.

“I’m good.” Fred let out another laugh-sob. “Sweet Circe, what is mum gonna say? What’s - what’s George - ”

Merope dropped his arm, finally, confident that he probably wouldn’t run. She patted his shoulder. “You’ll see them all again,” she said. “At some point.”

“Better not be seeing any of them for a bloody long time,” Fred rasped, now freely wiping tears from his cheeks. “I swear if George does anything stupid I’ll - I’ll - ” He sniffled loudly. Merope wished a handkerchief into existance and passed it to him. The tears burst forth freely - she could only stand back and wait, pointedly looking at the flowers waving in the faint breeze rather than at the sobbing young man before her.

Fred offered the now-damp handkerchief back to Merope. “Thank you,” he said thickly. His eyes were red, and he seemed drained after his cry, but he was still standing up straight, and his eyes were clear, not glazed and blank like some of the newly dead that Merope had escorted from the Garden.

Merope shook her head and pushed his hand back. “You keep it,” she said. “I have plenty - people tend to need them a lot, in here.”

Fred snorted weakly. “I’m not surprised,” he mumbled. “You come here often?”

She laughed - she couldn’t help herself. “Somewhat,” she admitted. “More than when I first died, I suppose.”

“It seems like a lot.”

“It is,” she acknowledged. “But it’s nice to - help. Nobody helped me when I woke up here - I was covered in nightshade, and I had to make my way out on my own. Now I like to guide people, instead.”

“What, you woke up here?” Fred gestured to the flowers around them.

“No, silly,” she said, allowing herself to be drawn into the teasing mood. He had said he owned a joke shop, hadn’t he? “This general place.” She held her arms out about herself. “We call this the Garden. It’s where everyone shows up when they die.”

“Pretty nice place,” Fred commented, as she slowly led him back to the path out, picking up her blankets on the way. “Who takes care of all this?” he asked. “For that matter… are there, I mean…” He paused, as if unsure how to continue.

“We don’t know if any sort of higher power is around,” Merope answered the question she’d gotten from many, many people. “Everything just sort of… works the way it works.”

“Huh,” Fred hummed.

“Everyone ends up here, though,” she continued. “No matter what they did while they were alive. So there is that.”

“I figured that, when you said Mold-mort would be here.”

“Mm,” Merope nodded. “You don’t have to ever see him, remember.”

“I’d like to, maybe once, so I could punch him in his stupid snakey face,” Fred groused.

“You wouldn’t be able to punch him unless he wanted you to punch him,” Merope warned him. “I admit he’s far after my time, but based on what I’ve heard about him, I don’t think he’d want to let you.”

Fred made a short growling noise, but said nothing else. They walked in silence, still but companionable, for the rest of the trip back. Occasionally Fred would blow his nose with the handkerchief again.

The front of the Garden was bustling with people. Together, Fred and Merope stood just before the threshold, while Fred stared around wide-eyed and Merope tried to find Amarantha’s tent through the growing throng of newly-dead and volunteer guides. Somebody was screaming across the way, a lady in a black dress with a dark black head of curls. Merope watched, a bit detached, as curses shot into the crowd but made no mark, and soon a man in dark robes successfully grabbed the woman and dragged her off into the Homelands.

“So she’s dead too,” Fred said coldly. “Good. She can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“A Death Eater?” Merope asked.

“Yep. Bellatrix Lestrange,” Fred said. “I want that to be the last time I ever see her again, for sure.”

A wisp of glowing smoke wound through the air as he spoke, curling around Fred’s ribcage. Merope watched without much interest - she had seen restraints invoked before - but she did watch, just in case Fred panicked. But when he noticed the slowly fading glow, he only stepped back once. “Is that - ?”

“That’s a restraint, yes,” Merope said. “It only glows for a bit after it’s first invoked, but you really will never see her again, now.”

“That’s brilliant,” Fred breathed.

She tugged on his robe sleeve. “Come across this way,” she said. “I’ll bring you to Amarantha - she’s a friend who runs the halfway tent out here, while I go in and find people.”

“She cute?” Fred said.

“She’s happily married.”

“Drat.”

  


Merope found and escorted four more people from the Garden, until it was an hour past noon. “You need to take a break and eat at some point,” Amarantha said to her as she returned with the latest arrival - an Auror named Anita. Merope glanced at Anita to see if she needed anything more, but she was already making a beeline towards the shabby man and woman. Fred had recognized them - Remus and Tonks were their names, apparently, and it seemed that Anita knew them too. Fred was sitting in the corner with his arm over Colin’s shoulders, at the moment, and Merope smiled in relief.

“Morrigan speaks! Merope,” Amarantha said, a bit louder. Merope turned. “Come on,” her friend groused. “Go home and eat. You’ve done a lot already.”

Merope shook her head. “I’m going in one more time,” she said. Amarantha made a disgruntled noise. “I promise you I’ll eat then! We could go to your house, even, if it’ll make you feel better,” she said.

“Just because you could not eat doesn’t mean you shouldn’t,” Amarantha scowled. The importance of eating on a regular schedule, despite not technically needing to eat in the afterlife, was a regular screed that she liked to go on. Merope had heard it many times, enough to know all the right places to nod - but she did think Amarantha had a point, insofar as everyone needed breaks sometimes.

“Only one more,” she promised again. “Here - if I find nobody quickly, I’ll just come back. How’s that?”

“Acceptable.” Amarantha scowled.

  


Merope did find somebody quite soon after wandering in - but the somebody was clearly a Death Eater. He was a sallow man with a hooked nose and shoulder-length, greasy hair, but he was wearing the Death Eater uniform robes. Merope had gotten somewhat good at recognizing them, and since he wasn’t yet awake, she steered herself away before he came to.

Then there came a long, calm stroll by a trickling brook, ferns lapping at her ankles. Merope allowed herself to enjoy the sunlight, but eventually, as time began to drag and she had found no new dead, she began to wonder if perhaps she should go back.

A flash of silver sheen in the flowers by the brook caught her eye, and she stepped in, leaning down. There within the clover-flowers and dandelions, wrapped in roots, lay a pale white hand. The sheen, she saw, had been from the inside of the hand - one of the fingers was cut open from knuckle to tip, as if sliced by an incredibly fine blade. Silvery soul-blood leaked from it, swirled with trace veins of reddish-orange. The rest of the body was nowhere to be seen - all there was was the hand, buried at the wrist in the mossy soil.

Merope paused at the sight, because she’d seen nothing like this before, in all her time in the Garden. Perhaps her theory of the newly dead being pushed up from below was real after all.

She reached down despite herself, and ran a fingertip lightly over the back of the pale hand, avoiding the soul-blood. The hand was cold, as if truly dead, and the skin felt almost scaley.

Strange.

She would have liked to mark the spot somehow, or even to sit there and wait to see if any more of the body of whoever this was rose up. But it could perhaps take days for the full individual to appear, and marking locations did not work in the Garden, once you had exited. So instead, Merope only took one last glance at the strange hand, and turned back to the entrance.

Lunch at Amarantha’s house was light, rye bread with cheese and grapes. She returned briefly to the tent to bid goodbye to the new arrivals she had helped, and then returned to her home on the same path that had led her away this morning.

  


Throughout Merope’s death, she could only remember feeling two regrets for her life. The first, that she had not followed after her husband with more persistance when he had tried to leave. The second, that she had not had the chance to know her son.

After arriving in the afterlife - and once she had finally realized the blessing that came with the enforced pacifism of this place - she had wanted nothing more than to see Tom again, her husband Tom, that was. Yet as she waited, and as time passed in the away, she still never saw him. Not even when so many years had passed that he had certainly died did she ever see him.

It saddened her - but in her time being dead, she had grown more and more able to function without him. She still missed him, of course, and she always would, but it was no longer a sharp pain. It was more of an occasional ache, coming and going, never interfering too much in her ability to be and live - or, to exist, at least.

Her son was a different matter.

Merope hadn’t really expected it to be true, what they said about mothers and love. Perhaps it truly wasn’t true for some. But she knew, objectively speaking, that she had died merely minutes after her Tom - the son - had been born. She couldn’t even remember if she had gotten to hold him or not. Then off she’d gone, to awaken in a field of nightshade under a deep gray sky. It hadn’t seemed to her that she would have been likely to develop that alleged motherly attachment, when she’d never even seen her son alive - only heard him making baby-hisses in Parseltongue, enough to let her know that he was alive.

It hadn’t come at first. At first she had been preoccupied with her own misfortune, and she had torn her hair out over her husband’s departure. She had been afraid of meeting Marvolo or Morfin, and she questioned sometimes why she’d given her precious son the middle name she had. Did her father even deserve to be remembered that way? She’d thought so at first - grown less and less certain the longer she existed in the afterlife, the more friends she managed to make with other women, the more she learned to enjoy herself for real.

Death treated Merope very well, for her life had been absurdly small in comparison.

But as she learned to enjoy herself, and to let go of her husband’s hurtful departure, and to entirely dismiss her father and brother, she had found herself thinking more and more about her son. Her Tom. Where was he now, she wondered? Still alive, she hoped desperately. Happy, she hoped even more desperately, because she herself had not been very happy, and she knew how it could burn to feel that way. She hoped that he had magic, but she certainly would never have minded if he hadn’t. She hoped he was able to learn more than she ever was - that he would have a job enough to have his own house - that he would have a wife who he loved. (Or maybe even, she thought once certain truths were realized to her, a husband who he loved. Who was she to limit her son in that way, after all?)

Absence made the heart grow fonder, allegedly - but could it make it grow fonder when absence was all that there had ever been? Strange to say that Merope, at least, found that in utter absence love could still bloom, and by the time that Tom would have been around thirty, she knew without question that she loved him. She had hopes and wishes, as of course any mother did, but she tried fiercely to make herself remember that she knew nothing about her son. She could not build up some image in her head with no relation to truth but the name of it - that wouldn’t be a real son.

So instead, she asked.

She didn’t know much. If not for the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, she knew she might have known nothing, but she refused to feel grateful for the death wrought. Nevertheless she was grateful for the information - old heads of wizarding families recalled their own sons and daughters mentioning a boy named Riddle. Tom? Ah yes, that was the name. Smart, good at school, very magical, attending Hogwarts, sorted into Slytherin. What about him? No idea where he went after graduation.

It wasn’t a lot, but it really was enough for Merope. She was so proud of him, and when he died - she hoped not for long, because she wanted him to live first - she knew she wanted to meet him. But it would be a long time until Tom died, she knew. She would merely have to be patient - she would have to wait.

  


After the Battle of Hogwarts had entered the local colloquial of Afterlife Britain, and the deceased from that battle had filtered neatly in the vast community that was the dead of the British Isles, Merope thought that she ought to face facts.

Her son would be 70 or so now. Under normal circumstances, he would still be alive, wizardry healing him up as needed. But her son’s life in Britain would not have been normal circumstances, not unless he somehow managed to isolate himself to an absurd degree. She wouldn’t want that for him, so she hoped that wasn’t the case. But if it wasn’t the case, it meant that he had lived - maybe - though two violent, vicious Wizarding Wars.

It was the ‘maybe’ that set Merope to work.

She took to crawling through After-London, and later some of the other major British after-cities, a day or so every week. She would search for wizards and witches and ask them if they knew her son. The results of her quest were depressingly uniform: “Who?” and “No, sorry.”

Nevertheless, she persisted, determined that Tom might not be dead yet - determined that even if he was, it was impossible for him to drop off the map, so to speak, and so she only had to keep looking. Some days she wondered despondently whether he had left the country altogether during his life, and if she was looking in entirely the wrong place. But she never thought of giving up. She only thought, if that is what it takes, then I will comb the entire afterlife to find him. Who cares how long it takes - we have eternity in here.

(As it turned out, determination taken to levels of ‘who cares how long it takes’ was a trait shared by both mother and son.)

Time passed, and Merope searched for her son on weekends, and occupied herself otherwise with her friends and her Garden work during the week. She had no luck - but as it happened, when Earth had passed into the year 2043, she heard the news that Harry Potter had died.

If anybody is likely to know an absurd number of people in the insular magical community, Merope thought vaguely as she sat at a patio establishment in After-London and sipped her orange juice, it is somebody famous like Harry Potter.

Maybe he would even know who Tom Marvolo Riddle was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my good friend Jillian for letting me ramble about this idea (and many, many others) at her. Jill, if you read this, remember: ice cream and bubble baths are the universal constants.
> 
> I am in grad school, so it's entirely possible that any posting schedule could seriously slip, and therefore I won't have one. However, the next chapter is very well outlined, and I will be traveling this weekend, so it will be able to come sooner rather than later, one hopes.


	2. After you die, you...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I’m working through some of my overdue catharsis in this chapter. My condolences for any further feelings I may cause.
> 
> Also, the epilogue is dead to me, and while I find Cursed Child at least vaguely interesting, it is not canon to this story. Our deviation to Harry is merely necessary to set up some details.

Harry Potter entered the afterlife in a bed of white lilies, staring up into a silvery gray sky. The soil and grass beneath him was soft and pleasant to the touch - not warm, ever so slightly cool, but not in a way that drained his body heat.

Oh, he thought. Then: Aha. So this is where the train goes.

Leisurely, he sat up, brushing the flowers carefully away from his body. One broke off - he held it up, peering more closely at the soft petals. They were truly pure white, not even a speckle of some other color to be seen on them, and they nearly glowed under the faint moonlight. Aside from the familiar sense of a distinctive emptiness in his soul, Harry felt incredibly peaceful. He allowed himself to keep sitting in the middle of the rolling meadows of flowers, watching the clouds scudding lazily across the sky, and feeling rather pleased to have nothing at all required of him.

As he watched the scenery, a small black dot appeared in the distance. It grew larger and fuller with each moment that passed, until Harry could make out the familiar shape of an owl winging its way towards him. He wondered if it was a mail-owl, or simply a wild one, but also figured that maybe the distinction didn’t matter much, given that this was the afterlife.

Yet it kept growing larger, and he saw that it was white - a snowy owl. He felt a pang, remembering Hedwig, and sighed as he tried his best to push it away. He thought he wouldn’t mind if the owl flew over him entirely, or altered its flight course away from his location. But it kept approaching, until he was certain that it was swooping directly down at him, on a collision course, or at least on a landing course. He shifted, suddenly finding his wand in his forearm holster, and took in a breath as he watched the owl grow even larger in his view.

The owl landed only a few feet from him, wings beating into his face as it settled down. It was a larger owl, with fewer dark speckles - Harry thought that it was probably a lady owl, based on what he knew of snowies. There was a familiar looking burnished mark on her beak, and for a moment he thought…

The owl swiftly picked her way closer to him, hopping onto Harry’s knee before he could react. He shifted automatically to support the weight of the large bird, feeling a little dazed at all the attention. As he tried to think about why the owl’s beak seemed so familiar, she stretched out her neck and began to aggressively preen a lock of hair that had escaped from its usual place tucked behind his ear. A rush of deja vu pounded through him, and he remembered the exact incident with his uncle where that little blemish had found itself onto her beak.

“Hedwig?” Harry whispered.

The owl shreed - a happy noise - and nuzzled his cheek before going back to her preening. Mindful of his contacts, Harry dabbed a sleeve at his suddenly burning eyes and muffled a happy sob behind his other hand. Hedwig made a creaking noise at him, and preened more intently for a few moments, until Harry was really sobbing into his hands regardless of himself. Hedwig, he thought dumbly - he had missed her so much, even decades after losing her, and yet here she was.

“Were you waiting for me?” he asked her, to which she shreed happily again. The smile across his face had to be one of the dopiest he had ever made, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop making it. She was soft - he ran his knuckles carefully down the back of her head and neck, just enjoying the confused but warm emotions that came with finally having his familiar back.

For the briefest of moments, the little roiling ache in his soul felt like it had disappeared entirely.

  


Harry Potter was half-empty, and had been since May 2nd in 1998. It had been something like 5:00 in the morning, maybe 5:30, when he had lost that essential piece. Harry would be the first to admit that he didn’t actually know what time it had been. Things had been happening - sleep and the passage of time had been the last things on his mind.

In a way it had freed him, because Voldemort had been dead. But in another way, it very much hadn’t freed him at all. He had lost something very significant when Voldemort had cast that second _Avada_ at him, and with the man himself dead…

Well. Harry had stared dully at Voldemort’s body as it struck the ground. The Hogwarts crowd erupted into cheers and wild screams around him, and the Death Eaters scattered in shock and horror, and Harry -

Harry sank to his knees and started to weep, the hardest he had ever wept since he had been a young child.

It had been shock, Hermione said. But shock didn’t drive you to tears at random moments, even months and months later, when you caught sight of a red jewel in someone’s earring and were suddenly reminded of the color of somebody’s eyes. Shock did not mean that you woke up constantly expecting to have missed something, expecting to see a certain person standing behind every corner turned, because he couldn’t possibly be dead. Shock did not lend itself to wild, out of control imagined conversations about the absurdities of post-war reconstruction.

_If he were here, he would say… and I would reply… and he would say back… If he were here, I would tell him… and he would squint at me and shake his head… and I…_

It took a vivid audio-visual hallucination of Voldemort waltzing into the Weasley kitchen in all his silvery-scaled glory and heckling their table settings for Harry to admit that maybe something was wrong. As always, he didn’t know what he’d do without Hermione - her newly acquired contacts in the Department of Mysteries aside. The Weasleys had been ready to accept it merely as another remnant of the trauma of fighting a single man for his entire life. Hermione hadn’t been ready to accept that, and so she’d thrown Harry at a psychologist, and at the DoM, and at a couple of other distracting hobbies as well. Ultimately, that was how they’d all found the hole inside of Harry’s soul - the one that he’d never be able to fill again. The broken soul-bond might have eaten him alive with enforced grief if they’d never noticed it.

He didn’t know what he’d do without her, really.

  


Harry wandered out of the strange garden with Hedwig seated firmly on his shoulder. He passed a neat little field of tents, and though he noticed a few people trying to hail him with - pamphlets? - he didn’t bother to stop and take one. People were always trying to hand him things to autograph, and even if they were only instructional, he much preferred to simply figure things out on his own.

Instead, he walked into the silvery forest, and eventually Harry found himself in the shimmering, white Kings Cross station that he recalled from his temporary foray into the afterlife - a lifetime ago, now, wasn’t it? It was a bit less shimmering and white, now, a bit more defined and less misty than it had been. The struts in the ceiling were silvery gray, the rails a similar color. The platform was ivory, and the walls were composed of bricks of either a pure white or an ever so slightly off-white cream color. There was no mist - but it was quiet and peaceful, all the same. There was only one platform - only one set of rails. The train, a deep rose-red splotch amidst all the white, sat humming happily at the far end of the platform.

Despite himself, Harry looked under every bench as he walked towards the train, wondering if he would find - if he would see -

But the horcrux was gone.

“It does not do to dwell on dreams,” Harry whispered to himself as he boarded. He could not truly say he was unhappy that Albus Dumbledore had not visited him again. But he could say that he still believed in that one quote, at least. Hedwig screeched on his shoulder, as if agreeing, and he patted her breast feathers happily.

The train was small - only one segment, an engine mixed with a passenger car. Everything within was just the same as the Hogwarts Express. Harry sat down, leaving the compartment door open, and Hedwig hopped onto the seat beside him. Soon they pulled out of the station, and Harry waited patiently for whatever part of his life - or maybe he should call it his afterlife - was going to follow this.

The ride might have lasted only ten minutes, or a couple of hours - Harry couldn’t have said. But the train slowed to a halt, and a gentle chiming noise sounded throughout the car. Harry held out his arm, and Hedwig clambered right up onto his shoulder, nipping at his ear playfully.

The train vanished into a pale mist as Harry stepped from the ladder and onto the ground. Before him lay a series of townhouses, each one apparently completely different from the next. The green-eyed man glanced about, wondering exactly how the train had managed to arrive here when there were no rails on the road behind him - but then again, this was the afterlife, wasn’t it? He could hardly question whether or not anything made sense.

Directly in front of him was the gate to number 11. It was wood, unpainted, but maybe stained - Harry wasn’t an expert in woodworking and he couldn’t quite tell. He pushed it open, enjoying the homely creaking noise it made, and proceeded through the front lawn to the door. There was a knocker in the shape of a clawed paw - he knocked.

Footsteps thumped towards him from beyond the door, and a muffled voice asked, “Are we expecting anyone?” A man, Harry thought vaguely. There was a pause, perhaps for somebody to reply, before the door was tugged open. A scruffy, black-haired man with a bit of silver at his temples peeked out. His eyes were gray, and his beard looked like it had been the victim of a failed attempt at shaping it into a goatee.

Harry’s eyes widened, and he struggled to maintain his composure.

“Sirius…” he gasped - exactly as the man said, “Harry?!”

Then they were hugging, and Hedwig was fluttering about hooting irritably, and Harry thought, really, the afterlife is perfect.

  


Harry had been able to hold his composure around Sirius. But for some reason, the sight of Tonks and Remus left him inconsolable, and he promptly burst into tears as he hugged the both of them fiercely, and babbled about Teddy - as many facts as he could recall. They took it all in stride, ushering him into their sitting room, and offered him tea. Harry tearily stirred in his usual milk, no sugar, and did the others the favor of ignoring their own occasional sniffles.

Finally, the silence had gone on too long, and somebody needed to speak.

“Sirius?” Harry asked.

Sirius reached over and grasped Harry’s hand in his own. “Yeah?”

“Were you - in the loop, I suppose?” he asked. “Or do you need a run-down?”

“Of what?” Sirius sounded baffled.

“Of my life,” Harry retorted.

“Oh,” said Sirius. Remus laughed aloud, and Tonks giggled as well. “Maybe just the highlights reel?”

Harry found himself laughing, too - and then everyone was laughing, their emotions infectious. Harry had been happy and at peace, before. But this was different - this was somehow even more powerful than any other peace he had ever experienced. He felt joy - he felt content without feeling like he was intentionally ignoring any sources of anxiety. It was wonderful, and he wanted it to go on forever.

“Alright,” he giggled, finally composing himself. “The highlights reel it is.” The rest of the gathering leaned forward, teacups finding their way out of hands and onto flat surfaces. Harry took a long sip of his own tea, finishing it off, before he sent it back to the kitchen with a little burst of wish magic. Where ought he to begin, anyway…

“Well,” Harry said, “I guess Prof - I guess Remus got Sirius up to the Battle of Hogwarts?” There were nods. “Well, we won,” Harry said simply. “I managed to - well, to trick Voldemort into dying, really. It was a little weird.”

“We did hear that,” Tonks said. “Somebody started spreading news almost immediately, somehow - we didn’t hear anything about how, just that he was.”

“Is he here?” Harry asked before he could help himself.

“Nope,” said Tonks with satisfaction. “Never showed his face. Never heard anyone say anything about seeing him.”

The hole in Harry’s soul twisted uncomfortably into a sharp ache, and he forced himself to swallow the lump in his throat. “Alright. I sort of expected that, anyway...” He shook himself and stroked Hedwig’s feathers for a moment, just as a distraction.

“You expected it?” asked Remus carefully.

“Long story,” Harry said, forcing himself to smile. Remus frowned back at him and Harry knew that he hadn’t managed to make it natural enough. He stopped trying, instead turning his eyes to the ceiling briefly and allowing himself an upset sigh.

“What’s wrong, pup?” Sirius asked. “Wanted one last jab?”

“No,” Harry said. “I suppose I’d better tell you - I’ve just gotten so used to all my friends and family knowing this…”

“Knowing… what?” Tonks asked. Sirius was nodding along with her, looking just as bewildered, but Remus sat back in his chair, more pensive than anything else. Harry wondered if Remus was already suspecting something close to the truth.

“Have you ever…” He started as he usually did, and then realized that his audience might not even know about horcruxes and soul jars. “Actually, let me back this up. You all know Voldemort made pretensions of immortality, and was also just generally hard to kill?”

“Hard to catch, too,” Tonks grumbled. “You know, when I was a trainee Mad-Eye sometimes talked about how they might never have known there was a Dark Lord if he hadn’t announced himself after the first seven raids. People either never saw him, or they were dead, and couldn’t mention him.”

Harry nodded at her, trying to ignore the way his mind latched hungrily onto this new piece of information. “Well, he was actually immortal, sort of,” he said. “He had horcruxes.”

Sirius yelped. “He was a lich?!” Then: “Wait, did you say horcruxes? Plural?!”

“Yeah,” Harry winced. “There were seven of them. The reason I was running around the countryside with Ron and Hermione during what would have been my seventh year was because we needed to find them and destroy them, before we could do anything about him.”

“Seven,” Sirius moaned, leaning back and wrapping his arms around himself. “That is - disgusting. Merlin, how did he live?”

“I’m missing something here,” Tonks said slowly.

“Horcruxes are like - it’s like pulling your teeth out, but metaphysically,” Sirius said. Behind him, Remus was nodding along solemnly, and Harry was at least glad that they knew, and he probably wouldn’t have to explain too deeply for Tonks’ benefit. “You split your soul into pieces and stick one of those pieces somewhere else - even doing it once would be horrific, but seven times?”

Tonks wrinkled her nose, and the pink fled momentarily from her hair. “That’s terrible,” she said slowly, in a way that told Harry that she didn’t really understand why it was terrible.

He sat up before they could get into a discussion of how terrible it all was. “So, yes, he had horcruxes, plural. I was able to get rid of all of them, but… well. One of them was me.”

They stared at him, Sirius with a muffled choking noise. Harry hastily continued. “I’m not now, obviously,” he said. “But on Halloween, when he - when mum and dad died, and he tried to kill me, the backlash of being hit with an Avada splintered him even more, considering how badly he’d already messed himself up. The fragment ended up in my body with me, so… that happened.”

“Sweet Hecate,” Sirius whispered.

“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Harry said, trying to pretend like he wasn’t perturbed by their reactions. “I didn’t even know that it was there, until somebody told me. And not a few hours after I’d found out about it, I went and tricked him into trying to kill me again, which got rid of the horcrux.” He smiled - he hoped it looked wry to the others, and not wistful, like it felt. “I was able to come back to life for a few different complicated reasons, that I don’t feel like going into - not that I don’t want you to know,” he assured them. “But I’ve given so many interviews about how I survived the Avadas and it’s common knowledge in the living world. I’m sure you can find somebody who’s read the biographies to tell you about it.”

“Well, it sounds like that went alright, then,” Tonks said. She grinned at Harry and held out her teacup, as if to toast him. “Who cares if you were accidentally keeping him alive for some of that time? You got him in the end.”

Hedwig hopped onto Harry’s shoulder and began to preen him again. He gave her a fond look and then glanced to Remus and Sirius, who didn’t look at all as satisfied as Tonks did. Harry wondered again if she really didn’t know anything about the nature of souls. Though - then again, he corrected himself, it had only really become common knowledge in magical Britain after the Voldemort debacle.

“There’s something else,” Remus said slowly, and Harry sighed.

“Yeah, there is,” he agreed. “We know more about soul magic than we used to, because of Voldemort, d’you know? The DoM did a lot of research. I was actually a good proof of theory for some of their dissertations.” He laughed, trying not to sound self-deprecating. “Human souls are more like - they’re not very easily containable, you know? They’re not easily self-defined. They’re more like - oh, what did Hermione say - more like fungi than anything else. And they - well - they can grow into each other. That’s how you get things like soul bonds.”

“Aren’t those a myth?” Sirius said.

“Not really,” said Harry. “Just - very unheard of in our society, for a long time.” He forced back another wistful smile and looked away. “We were the first one in about 700 years, at least in Britain.”

“We?” Tonks asked.

Remus leaned over and took Harry’s hand. He smiled gratefully at the man.

“What does that mean for you, Harry?” he asked softly.

“Oh, not much anymore,” he said. “I got therapy, once we knew what was happening. But I always feel a little empty, and I can’t manage to dredge up any of the really strong anger that I used to feel about him, and sometimes I feel like I miss him, even though he was a maniac who was trying to murder me and my loved ones. I just roll with it.”

Nervously, he looked at Sirius. But Sirius leapt over to hug him tightly before he could see much of his face, and - well.

He could roll with this, too, Harry thought.

  


Apparently, Sirius, Remus, and Tonks all lived together. Harry nearly dropped his dinner plate when he realized that Sirius and Remus had been involved even while he was alive, and then immediately felt very, very stupid for never realizing it while he was alive.

“In your defense, pup,” Sirius said, “being a teenager is a distracting time, even if you don’t have Dark Lords after you.”

“Maybe,” Harry muttered, shoving a bite of macaroni into his mouth. “But what about Tonks?”

“We share him,” she said, winking in Harry’s direction. Harry thought for a moment about what that might mean, and then decided that he didn’t care enough for that mental image to infect his mind.

“Well. Good for you,” he said instead. “Don’t ever tell me the details.” Sirius and Tonks started to guffaw - Remus turned red and pretended to ignore everyone but Harry for the remainder of the meal. Somehow they still managed to hold a conversation, about the afterlife, about Harry’s life, about the wizarding world in general. Remus was especially interested in Harry’s children, and Sirius was interested and then disappointed when he realized that Harry had never married and had in fact adopted those children.

“But what about Ginny Weasley?” Tonks asked.

“We didn’t work out in the long run,” Harry said. “Part of it might have been how I reacted to the end of the war. But I don’t think we would have worked out, even if I hadn’t had an accidental soul bond.” He paused, internally debating, and then decided to just go for it. “Besides, I think I’m mostly gay.”

“Only mostly?” was all Sirius said, leering at him, and Harry felt an unanticipated swell of affection for the three people before him.

“Mostly,” he repeated, putting the matter down without elaboration. “If it makes you feel better, just imagine that I am gay, and nothing else.”

“How boring.”

“Not everyone can be a flaming bisexual like you, Sirius Black,” Tonks said.

“At least he’s ‘mostly’ gay,” Sirius said, gesturing vaguely at the air with his fork. “Prongs and Lils are straight as nails.”

Harry dropped his knife onto the plate with a clatter. “Harry?” Remus asked. “Is something - ?”

“My parents,” Harry breathed. “Are they here? They are, aren’t they?”

  


“We’re invading!” Sirius yelled into the fireplace. Harry stood back, fighting the urge to clutch Hedwig to his chest like a child clutching a stuffed animal. Remus threw an arm around his shoulders, and Harry smiled at him gratefully. Hedwig, bless her, hopped into his arms anyway.

“You’re what?” said a woman’s voice from the Floo.

“Invading!” Sirius repeated. Without further ado he transformed into a dog and hopped into the flames.

“Oh Merlin, you - don’t you dare track soot everywhere again, Sirius!” the woman said again. Harry choked back a laugh at the thought of the shaggy black dog, covered in soot, and rolling gleefully on some hard-to-clean carpet. That certainly sounded like Sirius, alright.

Tonks went through next, leaving only Remus and Harry.

“Alright?” Remus said.

“I’ll be fine,” Harry said. “It’s just - it’s a lot, you know?”

“Do you want me to clear her out of the receiving room so you can come through without tumbling from the fireplace?”

At that, Harry remembered how bad he was at Flooing when he was nervous, and he gave Remus a grateful look. “Would you?”

“Of course.” Remus smiled down at him and patted him on the shoulder. “Just wait a couple minutes to come through.” He walked forwards then, and vanished.

Harry waited the requisite minutes, stroking Hedwig far more than she’d usually allow him to. She was being awfully cuddly, he realized as he had this thought. Usually she hated being touched for too long at once, but here she was, willingly nesting in his arms.

“Are you sure you want to go in the Floo, girl?” he asked her. “You can wait here if you like.” She merely looked at him witheringly, the way only owls could, and narrowed her eyes at him. “Alright, but you can’t complain about how terrible it is,” Harry said, grinning down at her. She screeched and nipped his thumb.

The two minutes were up. Harry walked into the fireplace.

The room before him when he emerged (and sat back up) was a cozy sort of sitting room, with a small loveseat-style couch at the back of the room, an end table with a lamp, and a number of bookshelves around the edges. The carpet was sooty - Harry guiltily wondered if that was him, Sirius, or a mix of both, but threw some wish magic at it anyway. Not all of the soot came up, but it looked much improved.

There was a clattering of dishes from the left, and Harry proceeded carefully towards the doorway. It led directly into a little kitchen with a counter island in the middle. Sirius, still in dog form, was sprawled to the side on some sort of soft rug, while Tonks and Remus were sitting on stools at the island, as well as - a man who looked both a lot like what Harry saw in the mirror every morning, and nothing at all like him.

The green-eyed man halted in the doorway and stared. That must be James Potter, he thought. His skin was a little darker than Harry’s, and his eyes were brown - nothing like Harry’s bright hazel. But he did have glasses, and he had that messy, curly, wild hair that Harry struggled with in the mirror every morning.

“Harry?” said a voice.

Harry turned and saw a woman with pale, slightly freckled skin and long bright red hair. He wondered if she had know he would be coming here - he wondered if this was a surprise. But now everyone in the room was staring at him as well, including James - his father.

“Er,” Harry said. “Hi?”

What a completely terrible first sentence to say to your parents, he thought - but it was all swept away when Lily rushed forward and drew him into a hug. Hedwig hooted and flapped away, irritable again at having her perch removed, and Harry smiled into his mother’s shoulder as he kept one eye on his familiar’s antics. Hedwig was wonderful, he thought. 

“Oh, Harry,” she said, and Harry was surprised when another pair of arms was thrown around him and James joined the hug. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

“Y - yeah,” Harry muttered, moving his arms around so he could hug both of them at once. “Me… me too.” More softly, he whispered, hoping only they would hear. “I missed you. Is that weird, since I didn’t really remember you, or - ”

“Not weird at all,” James said.

  


I miss you, Tom, Merope thought meanwhile, trying to imagine what her son's face would look like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to Wolf_of_Lilacs for their gorgeous comment on the first chapter, and spurring my lazy ass to finish editing this long-written second chapter.
> 
> Grad school is over for the summer, so I'm going to tentatively call for an update schedule consisting of every other week on Thursdays. If this works, it'll last until the end of August, but don't get too mad if I falter and/or update some other fic instead. I have a lot of ideas.


	3. the Boy-Who-Knows-Tom-Riddle-Jr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow I have been gone from this one for a while.

Harry Potter was very hard to locate. Merope discovered this truth when she began to wade her way through those wizards she had helped during the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, who ought to have made the task easy for her. Enough of them were the classmates of Harry Potter during their time at Hogwarts, at least as Merope reckoned it, that she should have been able to find him within one or two questions. Since that day in the Garden, she had taken to checking in with Colin, who hadn’t adjusted well to having to live without his parents. Merope thought that was reasonable, considering the circumstances, and had been happy to be a comforting adult presence.

She visited Colin a few days after wondering after Harry Potter, to take tea and to ask if Colin had known the man. In that curious way of the afterlife, he still looked sixteen. His mind, uncertain of what he would look like as an adult, had left him unchanged, unlike the many elderly folks who might find themselves with less gray hair, or at the very least, spryer than they had been. But he was much older now, and very much not a child.

He had gone to school a year below Harry Potter. But he did not know where Harry Potter was.

On Colin’s advice, Merope next sought out Fred. She had spoken with him much less often, as he had vanished from the tent quite quickly that day, but she had seen him around. He was accompanied now by his twin, and it had given him a cheerful aspect that Merope had never before seen on his face.

Yet…

“Sorry,” he had said, shrugging. “I do know where he is, but he doesn’t want us directing people to him who he doesn’t already know, and I don’t think you’re on the list.” He smiled a little sadly. “I know you’re alright, but he asked. Want some nibbles anyway before you go?”

She had taken a nibble carefully, aware from Colin of the tendency these particular Weasleys had towards pranks, but it had been nothing more harmless than her hair gaining some silver streaks. She chuckled along with them, patted Fred on the cheek, and took her leave merrily enough.

  


In the end, she found Harry Potter by accident.

There was a lovely floral park that Merope sometimes frequented, a cross between a botanical garden and a topiary zoo. It had large plazas of grass and flowers, walled off by trimmed and flowering hedges and connected by viney trellises. She was taking one of her weekly walks in this park, watching butterflies flit from flower to flower and enjoying the calm atmosphere, when she saw the brown-skinned man sitting on a bench with a book.

He had black hair that was very messy, sticking up in odd places, and a bit of stubble across his jawline. For all of that, though, he didn’t seem unkempt. He was wearing a light, half-sleeve wizarding tunic, and a pair of dark jeans tucked into unlaced dragon-hide boots. The only reason that she could tell he was Harry Potter was the vivid lightning-shaped scar that struck down from his forehead, through or around his eye socket, and trailed onto his cheek.

Merope stopped in her walk, and took a deep breath to calm herself, as she always did before she approached anyone to ask about her son. She ought not to get her hopes up, she knew - and so she reminded herself that even if Harry Potter didn’t know anything about Tom Riddle, she still wasn’t done asking.

He looked up as she approached, and then blinked and stiffened up immediately. She paused, hoping that he wasn’t going to be judgemental about her appearance, and offered him a small smile. “Mr. Potter?” she asked.

He folded his book closed and placed it on his lap rather stiffly. “… Can I help you?” he asked.

Maybe he thought she was going to bother him about his fame - the dress she had chosen for today was rather more wizard than muggle after all. She hastened to reassure him. “I’m not looking to bother you for an autograph or anything, don’t worry,” she said. “I was just - well, I was wondering if you had time for one question? It won’t be about the war.”

Now the stiffness had entirely retreated, and she saw his shoulders slump a little as he relaxed. She cheered to herself internally for that small success.

Potter had tilted his head to the side and squinted at her curiously, now. His posture was far more open than it had been. “That’s fine,” he said, offering her a tight smile. “What did you want to ask?”

“Well,” she said. “You see, I’ve been looking for somebody for a while, and well, just asking anyone from wizarding Britain if they know him. Perhaps you… Pardon me,” she said, stopping herself before she started to ramble - Potter looked more bewildered than anything else. “He’s my son. His name is Tom Riddle - I was wondering if you knew anything about him, if you’d ever met him?”

She pressed her hands together carefully, to stop them from trembling, as Potter stared up at her. His face had gone slack - she worried about that, though he still seemed to be aware of himself and focused on her. Nevertheless she got ready to call for one of her canals and hop on a boat to drift away, in case he started to get - loud.

“… Tom Riddle?” Potter finally got out.

“Yes,” Merope said. “I died in childbirth, so I never got to - I’d just, I’d like to know how he’s doing, or meet him, if he’s dead.”

“Dear Merlin,” Potter muttered. He had put one hand to his face, and now let out a long, drawn out sigh.

“… Mr. Potter?”

“Look, er - ” Potter paused. “Mrs. - Riddle?”

“If you like.” She shrugged.

“Well, what do you like?” he asked her, and - oh. That was very nice of him.

She inclined her head. “Mrs. Riddle is fine, I suppose, but my given name is Merope. I do like that a bit better.”

“Alright. Merope, then,” said Potter easily. He reached to the side and pulled on a loose, light green outer robe that Merope hadn’t noticed before, and tucked the book into it before standing. He stuck his hands into the pockets of the robe, threw his head back, and stared at the sky for a moment.

“… Mr. Potter…?” she asked.

“Just Harry, please,” he said, still staring upwards. “Mr. Potter is my father, and I’m not married.” He looked back down, a long sigh escaping his chest. Merope was beginning to feel quite bewildered.

“I know your son. I can tell you about him, if you like.”

For a moment she didn’t even register his statement, still feeling that confusion over his actions. But after that moment, the meaning of all those words in connection finally burst over her mind.

“Oh!” she cried. “You do? Really?”

“I think I do, at least,” Pott - no, Harry - said. “Tom Marvolo Riddle, right?”

She could have cheered, but settled for pressing her hands to her mouth in an attempt to hide her wide smile. “Yes! That’s him!”

Harry smiled gently at her, and offered an arm. “It’s a bit of a - tale,” he said. “And one that’ll take far too long to tell in public. Would you be alright with coming back to my place? I can put tea on.”

Merope regarded the offered limb. She did not like the idea of going to the house of a stranger, especially a man, who she did not know. But that was merely false trepidation, she knew, in a land such as the afterlife. He could not touch her if she did not want him to, she reminded herself, and carefully reached out to take his arm.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  


Merope was quite proud of herself about half an hour later, for she’d drunk the tea Harry had prepared without even a single second guess. Then she noticed what she was congratulating herself for, and told herself she was being silly - he had been perfectly nice so far, and there was no reason to feel brave, in any case.

“Well,” Harry said, once he had gotten the biscuits to match whatever standards he had. “Tom, huh?”

She blinked at the casual use of her son’s given name. “So, you haven’t just heard of him - you’ve met him, you know him?”

“All of those,” Harry said, slowly dipping a biscuit into his tea. “I…” He let out a long breath, and she interrupted him before he could speak again, unable to help herself.

“Do you know what he was doing, after Hogwarts?” she asked. “I know he went to Hogwarts, and he was in Slytherin, and he had good marks, but not much else. Did he stay in Britain? Did he move away? Did he ever marry? Did he have any children? What did he do for work? Who were his friends? How did you meet him? Were you friendly? Did he - ” Her voice cracked, and she almost whispered, “Was he happy?”

“I…” Harry’s brow furrowed. He looked almost weary, and Merope would have said that his expression was a guilty one. But what for? “Well, we weren’t… really on the best of terms, no,” he said. Then he snorted abruptly. “Maybe that’s an understatement.”

The strange looks, the sighing, and the guilt suddenly aligned in Merope’s mind into an unhappy conclusion. “Oh,” she said, sitting back, and feeling - disappointed, she supposed it was. Then she immediately felt rather silly for not considering this at all. There was never any guarantee of anything, after all, when she hadn’t been there. “Was he a Death Eater? That’s how you know him,” she concluded dimly.

“You’re familiar with Death Eaters?” Harry asked.

“Well, I have been going around for a fair number of years now, asking about my son,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. “I think I’m quite good at recent British wizarding history.”

Harry nodded. “Right, well - I guess you know the general outline of my involvement, then?” He grimaced at the word ‘involvement’.

“I do,” Merope nodded. “I know that you lived through a Killing Curse as a toddler, and there was some sort of brou-ha-ha at that time that also resulted in Voldemort being banished, presumed dead. He wasn’t dead, though, and somehow resurrected himself in 1995, in a debacle that also involved you. You fought him a few more times and managed to escape alive each time. In 1997 he took over the Ministry of Magic, and about eight months later the Battle of Hogwarts occurred, and you died, but didn’t, again, and he died, but for real this time.” She frowned into her teacup. “You know, a few times I said to myself, why can’t these men just settle down and be dead like reasonable people?”

“You mean, why can’t Voldemort?” Harry asked.

“Well, him. But you too!” she said sternly. “All this popping up and down and dying-but-not-really. It near made my head turn and I wasn’t even there, just hearing about it from others who’d only heard about it.”

Harry burst into laughter. As he slumped over the table and ran a hand through his hair, Merope decided that she liked Harry Potter. He seemed like a good man.

“Well,” he said as he sat up. “I guess you’re right. We are weirdly similar, after all…” A strange expression passed across his face, and he sighed again. “Well - um. Merope. Look.” He looked at her intently. “You seem like a nice person, and I’m worried that if I keep telling you things, it’ll upset you. Do you - ”

Merope interrupted him. “I don’t care,” she said firmly. “I don’t believe in blood supremacy. But he’s still my son, and even if he did wrongly, I would rather know than not know.” She fixed Harry with a determined look, hoping that he would take the hint. He, in turn, sat back slightly, looking over her entire demeanour with a long, sweeping glance.

“… Wow,” he finally murmured.

“Hm?”

“You - he had an expression like that one you just made. When he was being bull-headedly stubborn about something.”

Merope felt her face twisting into a very crooked smile at that. So he was stubborn, too? She knew she was, or so others told her sometimes. Merope herself had often felt unable to see it, but then again - she’d been rather stubborn in her search for her son, hadn’t she? And he was just like her, in this one way. “You saw him often, then?” she asked, trying to get a feel for whatever relationship Harry might have had with her son - even an antagonistic one.

“I did, yeah,” Harry said. “But he - well. He wasn’t a Death Eater.”

She frowned. “No? Then - ”

“He was the guy in charge,” Harry said, and took in another long breath. “He was Voldemort.”

Voldemort.

Voldemort?

“He what?” Merope echoed, not sure if she had heard correctly.

In reply, Harry summoned a little sheet of paper and a fountain pen. With all capitals, he scratched out a line of three words at the top, and then another line of four underneath - she couldn’t read them as it was upside down. He drew little lines between each letter, matching them one-to-one, and then slid the paper around so that Merope could read it.

_TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE_

_I AM LORD VOLDEMORT_

“Oh,” was all she could say.

Harry tried to take the paper back, but Merope snatched it before he could. It got a bit creased when she did - with trembling fingers she smoothed it back out, staring dully at the little matching lines in their perfect one-to-one.

Her son was Voldemort?

It seemed a strange joke. Voldemort was, allegedly, an extremely dangerous, accomplished, magically powerful dark wizard. Merope was a squib who merely had enough talent to perform divinations and brew potions. Voldemort was a blood supremacist. Merope was firmly of the belief that blood supremacy was stupid and not worth the trouble.

But then again, she thought, reminding herself of the old adage. How could her own beliefs have anything to do with her son’s? She hadn’t been able to raise him. He’d have had nobody to ask. And blood supremacy had been popular in the commonly Slytherin families back in that day - she’d gleaned as much from her chats with dead wizarding lords. Tom could have emulated his peers too much. He might have had no idea that his father was a muggle, and his mother a squib.

But he had murdered people - Voldemort had _tortured_ people. How could he do that? Merope couldn’t say she understood the impulse to violence. It just didn’t make sense to her, and it never truly had. She wished she could ask him. That was the only way she could understand, wasn’t it?

“Um,” Harry was saying. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth. If you want to go, and not come back, or if you want to go and maybe think about it before coming back later, when you’re ready, then feel free. And I mean - ”

Merope was almost tempted. A major part of her wanted to run back to her cottage and never see Harry Potter again, perhaps even to brew a forgetfulness potion that would take away most of today. At the same time she couldn’t imagine being that cruel to herself. Even a Death Eater would have been better - she knew some of them had been coerced, lied to. But her son hadn’t been coerced - her son had been doing the coercing. She had always told herself that it was okay if her son’s life didn’t quite match her own expectations of a life, so long as he had been happy. But could she be happy with this life, even if he had been happy?

Yet, all the same, running away was stupid.

_I am Lord Voldemort._

Merope carefully folded up the piece of paper and tucked it away in her skirt pocket before she met Harry’s eyes again.

“Tell me everything,” she said firmly.

Harry blinked. “Do - do you really want to know? Right now?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

“… It’s not really very pretty,” Harry said slowly. “He wasn’t a very good person. But I’ll say this, because it’ll drive me nuts if I don’t - everyone always claimed I killed him, but I never actually shot anything harmful at him. It was just an _Expelliarmus_. He died because of a weird, weird magical side effect that I was only half certain would work.”

Merope nodded slowly. “Even if you had used a Killing Curse,” she said, “I don’t think I’d be mad at you.”

“But - ” Harry blinked at her. “He’s your son.”

“And it sounds like he kept trying to kill you!” She frowned at her outburst and wrapped her hands around her teacup. “I’m sorry for yelling. But, I believe that counts as self-defense. Even though he is my son, if he died because you defended yourself from him trying to kill you, then - then maybe that’s his own damn fault.”

Harry nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Look, er. I feel like we might have started off a bit wrong - when you came over to me I thought maybe you were going to yell at me for killing him. I’m sorry if I seemed standoffish.”

“Oh,” Merope said. “I just thought you were worried that I was going to badger you for an autograph!”

After a short pause they both broke into slightly hysterical laughter. Merope took the opportunity to wipe at her eyes, which had started to burn as they spoke. Her son, she thought dully. Her son was _Voldemort_. Did that leave her still Merope? Or did that leave her Voldemort’s mother? The thought that somebody might define her by the identity of her son was - surreal. Merope wasn’t sure she liked it.

“How did you know who I was, though?” she asked.

Harry suddenly looked a bit uncomfortable. He fidgeted, stirring his spoon in his teacup and letting the clattering of metal on porcelain fill the silence for a moment. Merope frowned, and finally he relented.

“I saw you in a memory or two,” Harry said slowly. “It was - oh, it’s too complicated. Do you remember a man from the Ministry who showed up at your - no, at the Gaunt house to investigate some muggle baiting?” She frowned again, and Harry plowed on. “Ogden? Short, a bit round, walrus moustache… I think at one point Morfin hexed him so that his nose wouldn’t stop gushing pus?”

Ah. Yes. She did remember that, actually.

“How did you see that memory?” she asked him, forcing herself to keep breathing and not to let her spine turn into a pole. That had been when they had still been trying to make her use a wand, she remembered, and then pointedly tried not to remember much more than that.

The uncomfortableness returned. “You know who Albus Dumbledore is, I guess?”

“Yes?”

“He had been… researching your son’s history, I guess, collecting memories about him or around him. He had these private… he called them tutoring sessions.” Harry’s voice dipped, for the first time that Merope had heard, into what she thought might be Harry’s version of disgust. “When I was sixteen, he would have these lessons with me, showing me memories about Tom Riddle’s past. It was all a long game to make me think he was less human, I suppose, now that I think about it. But you were in that one - he got it from Ogden.”

“Less human?” she questioned, feeling a deep indignation fill her being. Even being Voldemort - this was her _son!_ If anyone suggested that he wasn’t human, than what was _she?_

“Dumbledore was convinced I had to be the one to kill him,” Harry said slowly. “For a lot of stupid reasons. In the end I suppose I kind of did - but, I also like to think I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to kill people, even if they’ve done bad things. Normally I am like that. Dumbledore thought - he thought if he could make me think he wasn’t even a real person, just some monster, that I’d just do it without feeling badly about it.” The man scowled down at the table. “I was only seventeen - I don’t know.”

“I see,” Merope said. Then she realized her omission. “I’m still not angry at you,” she said to Harry. “But I don’t think I like this Dumbledore fellow.”

“Well, I’m not sure I really like him either,” Harry said. “I think he could probably have prevented Tom from - well, going off the deep end, I suppose. If he’d only tried, or been a little more sympathetic. But it’s done now, so we’ve just got to deal with it…” He trailed off and sighed. “Let’s not talk about Dumbledore so much. I know a bit about what happened in your son’s life - do you want to hear?”

Merope nodded.

It was not a particularly enjoyable conversation. But then again, she did not know how it could possibly have been enjoyable.

Harry Potter, as it turned out, had been perhaps the only person who could have told Merope anything about her son. Tom Riddle had intentionally destroyed most references to his birth and past, so that nobody would have known what the young, intelligent Slytherin had become – so that nobody could have been able to tell Merope anything more than what she had already learned by what would have been the 1950s back in the real.

He had hated his birth name, Harry told her, and she felt a great wound opening up within her, of a sort that she had not known she would ever have to feel. She had been able to give him nothing but his body, his soul, and his name. Yet he had discarded one of those, mutilated another, and lost the other partway through his life, so that it had to be replaced with –

She had to tell Harry to stop describing it. Thankfully, he kept on being a good man, and he obliged her, and let her cry for a little in his bathroom. He continued being kind when he did not comment on her red eyes when she returned, and only poured her some more tea when she sat down firmly.

She knew, if she didn’t sit through all of it now, that she might not return to hear more later.

Harry Potter, for all that he was the only human capable of telling her these truths, and for all that Merope thought he ought to be rightfully hateful of her son, somehow did not appear so hateful. He spoke of Lord Voldemort without any of the fear-tinged vitriol that Merope had heard from the lips of so many witches and wizards over the years. At the time all of it had meant nothing to her, for she hadn’t known that they were, unknowingly or not, speaking of her very own son. To hear this biography would have been unbearable in that same fearful-hateful tone, but she would have forced herself to sit through it all the same. But instead, Harry Potter spoke with weariness and sorrow – with regret and ruefulness. He took no joy, Merope soon saw, in describing how her son slowly tore himself apart. His voice had in place of that joy the manner of a senseless tragedy, and in that tragedy, Merope was able to find a stable place to moor her own feelings.

It was still not a terribly enjoyable conversation.

  


When Harry was done, the two of them sat. Merope nibbled on a biscuit that ought to have been poppyseed flavored, but tasted like nothing more than sawdust. She could not force herself to touch her most recent cup of tea – she must have drunk five or six of them already. Across from her, Harry sat back in his own armchair and stared pensively off to the side, through the small kitchen and out a back window. The silence held them still in its grasp, as if they were manikins in a museum’s diorama.

Finally Merope gave up the biscuit as a lost job. She set it back down on her plate and thought of standing, but instead stared at it there, where it lay on the saucer, for a moment longer.

“You okay?” Harry asked.

“I will be,” she murmured. She wasn’t certain if this was true, but she said it anyway. “I’m sorry for imposing on you for so long. I should be going.” This time, the attempt to stand came easily enough, and Harry followed suit.

“You didn’t impose,” he said, walking her to the front hallway where she had left her cloak hanging on a coatrack. “I’m just sorry that I had to – to tell you all that.”

“Well, it sounds like you were the only one who could,” she muttered as she wound the fabric around her shoulders. “I just wish – ”

She found she couldn’t go on, her voice cracking brittly on the words she wanted to say. But Harry only nodded, his green eyes sad behind his glasses. “I know,” he said.

“Thank you for telling me,” she whispered, unable to bring her voice back to its full volume just yet. But these words had to be said. “It must have been difficult – ”

“Not more difficult than it was for you,” Harry said.

The holding silence descended again. The door, Merope knew, was just behind her. She did not know how to turn and take hold of the handle.

“If you’d like,” Harry began, and stopped.

“If I’d like?”

“You can come back around,” he said. His eyes flickered away from her face, but the faint reddening on his cheekbones said that it was embarrasment, not deception. “Whenever’s convenient for you – if I’m home and not busy, I’d be happy to have you. Just to talk, or hang out, or whatever you like. I have some boardgames if you’d like a distraction. Or if you want to – if you find you have more questions.”

“Oh,” Merope said. She didn’t have time to understand how she felt about that, so she only said, “Thank you, Harry. That’s very kind of you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did some work on my goals for 2020, looked at all the fics I have planned, and made a frankly overly complex ranking method to help me figure out what to work on. This and _Mi Aedijekit_ are ranked most highly for my excitement level, as well as various other factors, so, those two are what I'm going to be working on. In 2020 I hope to be writing 500 words a day, if not more, so I will be spending that time working on this project until I finish re-working _Mi Aedijekit_ 's outline. Once I finish tinkering with the outline, I plan to switch back and forth between the two every day.


End file.
